Chrome is the new internet explorer. Lots of people coming up with all sorts of arguments why they have to use it and can't switch. Internet Explorer used to be like that. MS really abused users and they still wouldn't switch. It's a form of Stockholm syndrome.

The history of Chrome is that it first displaced Firefox as a reasonable alternative (while funding that via a nice ad deal). And then they just steam rolled Internet Explorer to the point where MS gave up and rebuilt their browser around Chromium. It was that good. Fifteen years ago.

But these days you have to put up with a lot of crap from Google. Ad blocking works better on other browsers. Even some Chromium browsers (like Brave). But the thing with Chromium is that all Chromium derived browsers outsource most of the browser internals to Google. Google decides what features to implement, what PRs to merge, what features not to implement, etc. They set the standards. Safari, Firefox, and hopefully soon Ladybird are the only alternative browser engines keeping them somewhat honest on that front.

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cosmic_cheese 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Google has always aggressively promoted Chrome, too. The promotion is just invisible to most people since most people run Chrome.

If you visit a Google property using a Gecko or WebKit-based browser you'll get hit with banners nudging you to switch to Chrome and Google's iOS apps ignore the long-available default browser setting when linked are tapped, prompting you to choose between your default browser and Chrome even if you don't have Chrome installed.

And then there's the whole thing with how Chrome for Android conveniently never gained the ability to run even pared-back MV3 blocker extensions. Massive conflict of interest there.

I wish Google were called out for this stuff way more, but more often than not they're given a free pass.

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zaphar 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I use safari regularly and it has not really kept up. All kinds of stuff that is partly broken for rendering. Especially on heavily dynamic sites. Chrome at least works for any web standard which IE did not.

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mr_toad 43 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I have never cursed at a website for a rendering issue.

I have cursed too many websites to count because of their broken form designs (like assuming a particular postcode format) or reliance on cookies from ad vendors for basic functionality. If your website needs to generate “a new google recaptcha cookie” (whatever that means) before I can enter payment info, then sorry, no es bueno.

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jiehong 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It’s more like devs only test on chrome.

	▲	linguae 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Yup, just like during the bad old days of Internet Explorer's dominance. I remember encountering websites that only worked on the Windows version of Internet Explorer as late as 2006. We had a nice time in the late 2000s and early 2010s when web developers coded against standards instead of against the market-leading web browser. There was competition between Firefox, Opera, Safari, and a revitalized Internet Explorer. I don't remember IE 7 and later being that bad, though by then I had switched to Firefox on Linux/Windows and Safari on Macs. Then came an upstart web browser from Google named Chrome....and now we're back to the bad old days of web developers coding to the dominant web browser again.
	▲	cosmic_cheese 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Yes. These days if a site is broken in Safari there's a ~70% chance it's broken or degraded in Firefox too.

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lobf 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Where do you run in to this? I switched from Chrome to Safari about 5 years ago and can count the number of websites I’ve had issues with on one hand, I think.

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Alex_L_Wood 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Mobile Reddit is awful on Safari, but it speaks more about Reddit developers than it speaks about Safari.

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watermelon0 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Strava is an example of a website that's dog slow on Safari. Pages take 10+ seconds before they start rendering.

	▲	fouc 2 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		[delayed]

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oldsklgdfth an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> Chrome is the new internet explorer.

My take is Safari is the new IE.

It is packaged with the OS. I can't get an older version of Safari without an older version is macOS. From a testing standpoint, this means we have a bunch of hardware or images we never update so we can test against.

That was the IE thing, it was baked into the OS. Also, trash dev tools. Crashes pretty easily with the console open for more than 30s.